the city. Before the Wave had swept away most of Canada’s population, Vancouver had been a small city. About half-a-million people, as he recalled. It was twice that now, swollen with Canadians and Americans returned from abroad, where they had avoided the fate of their compatriots. Crowded too with migrants, another quarter-million of them from China and the Punjab mostly, although a few neighbourhoods were solidly Vietnamese and, surprisingly, Japanese. For the capital of such an empty, haunted country, Vancouver was crowded. Evidence of new, unregulated building was everywhere. Office towers had been given over to residential use without much planning, and new developments were spreading out on the city’s edge. Jed crinkled his eyes against the glare of the winter sun before turning away from the view.
‘The President knows nothing of this meeting and never will,’ he said. ‘Unless I’m called to testify in my own criminal trial at some point in the future.’
Agent Monroe did not react. She simply waited for him to continue. He admired that. Jed Culver had never been one for hysterics and drama queens.
‘Frankly, I’d have been happy if any arrangement you and I might come to could’ve been settled without the involvement of your boss here. I see no need to involve Mr Larrison -‘
‘Well, I can see plenty, Mr Culver,’ said the director. ‘Starting with the fact that my agents do not act without my say-so. I’ve reviewed your case and I agree there is a role for us to play - if Special Agent Monroe is willing. Operationally, she remains on secondment to the London Cage. But your concerns about Texas appear to overlap with unfinished business of ours. Perhaps they don’t, but the possibility that they do invites us to speculate and study the matter further. Agent Monroe is our in-house counsel on Baumer, to borrow a phrase from your former career. I also understand why the President needs to be kept out of it. From our perspective, sir, that is a matter of little import. Echelon is not an American agency. We answer to the Alliance Secretariat. But nor are we your Praetorian Guard, sir, nor Ms Monroe your personal emissary or executioner. If she runs with this, she does so on my dime.’
Jed conceded the point with a tilt of his head. ‘You’ve read the brief, ma’am?’ he asked.
‘Yep,’ said Monroe.
‘And?’
‘What can I say? We’re already in motion. The French didn’t release Baumer. Ahmet Ozal got him out and Ozal had a connection to Fort Hood through that salvage contract for Hazm. Contract’s not even registered in Texas, as I understand it. Treasury got the information from Hamburg. Luperico says -‘
‘Wait a minute - Luperico
‘Sorry. Poor phrasing,’ replied Monroe. ‘Luperico
‘Okay. Because I understood it was only you and him at the end.’
‘That’s right. He told me what we needed and then I settled our personal account.’
‘Is that something you’re in the habit of doing, Ms Monroe … Caitlin?’ asked Culver. ‘Settling personal business on company time?’ He was still a little put out.
She shrugged. ‘Business and pleasure. It can be hard to tell them apart some days. If you don’t like it, get someone else. I’ve got diapers to change.’
She wasn’t smiling as she said it. Jed felt the need to test her further.
‘It didn’t occur to you that there was more we could’ve learned by debriefing him out of the field?’
‘My mission parameters covered a hostile, in-field debrief,’ she said, without emotion, as if that concluded the matter. ‘The subject was terminated at the end of the debrief.’
Culver regarded her with the same caution he’d give a coiled rattler. Monroe was both an anachronism and a harbinger of the changed world. Fashioned as a weapon long before the Disappearance, she had proven she could adapt to altered realities more swiftly and with less apparent disinclination than most of the people he worked with. In their own way, everybody seemed to be trying to hold on to how things had once been, even as that history cracked apart and broke up like a giant ice shelf.
He exhaled slowly. It was her world, not his. There would soon be more like her, rather than fewer. Jed pressed at his stomach and tried to control the boiling underneath his right-hand bottom rib. Quite honestly, he preferred Luperico dead. The fewer loose threads to unravel, the better.
‘So you’ve read the brief, Agent. You know what we need.’
‘I read the summary. I only got it when I arrived. Ten minutes before you.’ There was no hint of accusation in her tone. Merely a statement of fact.
‘Well, read it all, before you agree to anything,’ he said. ‘Because in spite of what will undoubtedly be sterling efforts on your behalf from Mr Larrison here, you’ll have zero ass cover if this goes wrong. And it could go wrong about ten ways from Sunday.’
‘In my experience, Mr Culver, life can and does go wrong more often than not.’
He leaned forward. Not getting into her personal space, but approaching as near as he dared. ‘You’re a realist, Ms Monroe. That’s good. Because here’s the reality: this country is dying. The Wave ripped our heart out and we’re just staggering forward, carried along by our own momentum. We could be at war with Roberto’s little pirate kingdom within six months, and we could lose if it doesn’t go nuclear. If we’re not at war with him, we might just turn on ourselves. Mad Jack’s got his
As the White House Chief of Staff spoke, his earlier anxiety at meeting this woman fell away, replaced by the fears that really underlay his nervous agitation. They were the fears of negation, of total collapse, and the return of a dark age that would envelop the whole world.
‘I need you in Texas, Ms Monroe,’ he went on. ‘In the belly of the beast. You are not going to find Bilal Baumer there. Frankly, I don’t think you’re ever going to find him. In my admittedly amateurish opinion, Mr Baumer was pulverised into pink rat giblets by the US Air Force when they knocked flat about ten blocks of New York around the old Rock last April. But the reason Baumer was there, the reason he nearly bled us out - and, incidentally, the reason your husband and daughter were nearly killed too -
Both Monroe and Larrison were silent and still now as Jed spoke with more passion and genuine fear than he had for a long time.
‘When you’ve done your homework there,’ Culver said in conclusion, ‘you get down to General Musso’s and find out how and why Blackstone entered an arrangement with a company owned by Ahmet Ozal, one week before Ozal took ship for the new world, there to make an enormous and fatal pain in the ass of himself.’
‘It sounds like I’m going to have to get right up next to Blackstone,’ she said. ‘Why would he let me do that?’
Jed dismissed the question with a snort.
‘Mad Jack’s jumping around with a red-hot poker up his ass at the moment,’ he said. ‘Has been for months. The poker got jammed up there thanks to Roberto Morales.’
He could see he’d surprised her for the first time.
‘Yeah, I know. I don’t really understand it either, but Blackstone is convinced Roberto looks towards his little patch of heaven down Texas way with covetous eyes. He’s been trying to convince the President to pull forces out of the Pacific and put them in the Caribbean. That’s your way in. You’re going down as my personal envoy to give the governor a chance to make his case. Off the record. We keep everything informal. That’s how I do my best work and Blackstone knows it. He’ll give you an audience. Access. You use that as you see fit.’
‘What about Musso?’ asked Monroe. ‘He was the guy at Guantanamo, wasn’t he? Is he in the loop on this?’
Wales Larrison answered the question. ‘He is. It’s not my preference, but Mister Culver has his reasons and I
